«It is important to bring things into reality – it is not enough to just have good ideas; they need to be actionable.»
«It is important to bring things into reality – it is not enough to just have good ideas; they need to be actionable.»
«It is important to bring things into reality – it is not enough to just have good ideas; they need to be actionable.»
I am Matt, and I am part of Natural Building Lab at the TU Berlin, where I am teaching, researching and practicing as well as working on my PhD “Change Now, Architecture Later!”. That is probably the official job description – in reality, this also includes a large portion of organising, enabling, improvising and daily logistical problem solving – transporting heavy objects with cargo bikes, securing things with tension belts and trying to keep the batteries charged and the keys in the right place.
Honestly, I am not sure – it is not something that runs in the family. I think somebody suggested it to me growing up, and it stuck. I was always interested in graphics and photography at school and ended up studying for my bachelor’s in architecture at Newcastle University in the UK. By the end of my bachelor, I still only had the barest understanding of what the job was or could be. I certainly had not formulated a personal position in relation to any of it.
In 2011, I moved to Berlin for an internship with ZRS Architekten and started working with Eike Roswag-Klinge. I didn’t speak German at this point, so I went to language school every evening for the best part of nine months. One of my first memories with Eike is taking some measurements on a site, he gave me a Zollstock, and I remember thinking: what am I supposed to do with this weird stick? I initially planned to stay for six months and then apply for a master’s program in London. In the end, I worked for three years at ZRS between bachelor/master and spent some time working on conservation projects abroad, which gave me some hands-on experience and the chance to do some travelling. In 2013 I spent a month with the Tibert Heritage Fund in Leh (India) restoring earthen houses. I eventually had a place for the master’s in London but chose not to accept it because, by that time, Berlin was starting to feel like home, and my German was good enough to apply for the master at the TU Berlin.
The master’s was a significant phase for me. I was still working on a student basis with ZRS during my studies. I didn’t know the TU Berlin context, so it was a lot of new things for me. The first studio I did was a Hochbau Studio; I remember everybody meticulously casting stuff out of gypsum and cement; I had never seen that before – I didn’t realise until later that this was a bit of an architecture student convention. In that studio, it was more about space than programme, construction or user. I think by having one foot in practice, it was tough for me to adjust to that kind of abstract approach, and it was not something that I could initially identify with. After that, I did two urbanistic studios and found that approach interesting, one with the Habitat Unit, where I first got some idea of what being a “researcher” in architecture could mean.
My thesis also came by way of ZRS, where a German NGO approached us with a project partner in Karnataka in India, who had raised funds to build a school for disabled children and were interested in using local materials like earth and bamboo. I spent a month on my own in Karnataka with the local partner doing research and workshops. I spent a lot of that time using some approaches I had learned in different studios, such as mapping, photography, interviews and workshop formats to gather information. I also was really questioning myself, my motivations and the basic premise of the whole project.
Once I had presented my thesis, the conversations turned to the realisation of the project. I was then working full-time; I couldn’t imagine doing the whole project in my free time, so we calculated the absolute minimum fee we would need for the rest of the planning and construction with ZRS. I remember speaking to the NGO on the phone and just having to say: you know what, I would recommend that you hire a local architect and do the project that way because it makes no sense to give so much of your donation funds to a German office to plan a school in rural India.
The discourse surrounding DesignBuild has moved on a long way since 2016, and the PhD dissertation from my colleague Nina Pawlicki “Agency in DesignBuild” (2020), does a lot to unpack some of the complexity of the debate surrounding DesignBuild projects, which is by no means black and white. That whole experience was a real turning point; in the end, I am not sure if the school ever ended up being built – if so, it was probably a concrete box. Would it have been better the other way? Moreover, for whom would it have been better the other way? I am not sure, but I learned a lot during that time.
After two years of working full-time, I became quite frustrated with the office and needed a change. I had thought a bit about applying for a university job regardless of whether Eike would be moving to the university. I spent another four quite stressful months doing site supervision for a conservation project in Abu Dhabi for a change of scenery and approach; in the meantime, Eike and Nina started Natural Building Lab (NBL) in Autumn 2017. When I got back to Berlin at the start of 2018, there was a teaching position open; it felt like the right time for me, so I applied and was really happy to get the job.
Natural Building Lab is the Chair for Constructive Design & Climate Adaptive Architecture at the School of Architecture at TU Berlin. We started small but have grown with research projects over the last 18 months. Currently, our team is about 15 people.
Our key expertise is natural building materials and life-cycle construction. These are the themes and materials of the future. Since we started, we have seen students making much clearer demands from the institute to put these themes at the centre of their studies. We don’t need a reinforced concrete ban for our studios because the students don’t want to design concrete buildings. It is not about us setting rules or telling people what to do, just opening up a space for people to put the themes that are important to them in the centre of their projects. We have been doing a popular open lecture format called NBL Grundlagen (check the homepage for new dates) since 2018, where we cover themes such as timber & earth construction or life-cycle building for anybody interested and it is fantastic to see how many students from other disciplines or other universities are tuning in to hear them.
Besides materials, we have developed a particular approach and identity in our teaching over the last nearly five years. Our design studios nearly always have a real project context and involve working with real actors on real problems. We also try to bring the studio’s outcomes into reality, either in the form of DesignBuild projects with a construction phase or through exhibitions or performative presentations with project partners and non-experts.
The studio should be a place to learn collaboration, not a competition and the outcomes of the semester should belong to the entire collective rather than the individual. This means our studios often produce some extremely tight-knit collectives who carry on working together after the semester, and the projects often spill over into spin-off projects that span multiple semesters and formats. We usually start the semester with a critical-mass bike tour of the places we will be working in the different studios – in winter, this is usually about 75 people, so we usually have some more or less productive discussions with the Berliner Polizei.
My working space varies enormously depending on what is going on. Last winter semester, I was spending at least two days a week in the Wilma Mall in Charlottenburg (more on that later), one in Potsdam and the rest spread across home-office, the Fachgebiet and the workshop. I don’t even come to the office with the idea of having a concentrated and productive day anymore; there is always too much else going on, the socialising is also very important! If I want to be concentrated, I will stay at home or in Thüringen as part of Haus Döschnitz e.V.
I did attach a few candid photos from our TU Institute for Architecture office – it is a concrete monster with a special place in our hearts! We softened it by putting earth plaster on the walls and hoped that the late Bernhard Hermkes could understand the positive side of this (reversible) intervention.
For me, the essence of architecture is getting things done as a collective – I have a photo of a sticker that I saw in a climbing gym in Leipzig that reads: “the climate emergency will not wait until your bachelor is finished”. I love that photo! From the outside, I always thought a university job is all about design tutorials and reading ARCH+.
In reality, especially with the kind of projects and collaborations we are involved with, it is more like 20% content and 80% organisation – every semester, we have a new team, new partners and new contexts – we are constantly trying to enable things, to keep things moving forwards and this requires good collective organisation and decision making. I think this mirrors a lot of what is necessary in practice – yes, good design is hugely important. We need good designers, but if you want to enjoy the trust and belief required to push through a radical environmental agenda on a serious building project, you need to be exceptionally well-organised, collaboratively minded, and an excellent communicator. This starts in the design studio. We aim always to make ourselves as teaching staff surplus to requirements and to focus on what we can learn from the people we work with, not what they can learn from us. I think it is really important to practice communicating what we do with people from different disciplines and backgrounds.
Book/Magazine: Awan, N., T. Schneider, and J. Till. Spatial Agency: Other Ways of Doing Architecture. Taylor & Francis, 2013.
Tool: Japanese Saw – also handy for bread
Studio Format: Speed Dating – great for learning to get to the point quickly
Best way to make groups: Emoji Blind Dates
Animal: Donkey – uncomplaining logistic partner with pretty eyes
Machine: MiScreen – an absolute game-changer for our screen printing side projects
Building material: Earth – a pleasure to work with and full of potential for the future
Snack: Peanuts – I don’t know what I would do without peanuts
Emoji: :whale: – Pure happiness
This is something that I am thinking about a lot in connection with my PhD. The three aspects or roles – researcher, learner, and practitioner – are intertwined. We are fortunate at the TU Berlin to have highly motivated and engaged students from all over Germany and beyond, and these are the people who will be pushing the discourse very soon. I think we all need to work on themes simultaneously from different perspectives to respond to the sheer urgency of the challenges facing us.
As teachers/learners, we have to think about what the job will be like in ten years rather than ten years ago. For instance, I wonder how many of the next generation will even have the privilege to build new buildings with new resources – so why so much focus on new construction in architecture school? Who will be able to afford to build with reinforced concrete in 10 years – so why spend so much time in Bachelor talking about concrete and gypsum drywalls? We are also practitioners, and we want to be out there with our projects on the ground with real people making a real contribution by bringing new knowledge, innovation and approaches into reality through pilot projects, prototypes and processes. Being a researcher is, for me, about reflection and looking at ways to understand, document and improve our practice.
I am interested in practice-based research approaches, which allow me to make my creative practice as a teacher a valid form of research for my thesis, that can be interrogated and challenged. I hear a lot from students who don’t think they can work “academically or scientifically”. The research landscape in our field is, like so many other things, in transformation, and the change is towards approaches that can bring practice and research much closer together. It took me a long time to find a position in a hugely complex and somewhat intimidating field, but it is a really exciting time to be a researcher.
That said, there are some serious structural and administrative problems in the German university system that make it extremely difficult to achieve any long-term job security – only the fewest people will make it to a professorship, and the majority of these people remain to come from practice, rather than an academic background. I would like to see more requirements for people with a professorship to be held to account to feedback from their colleagues and students rather than being offered a life-long position with no incentive to innovate. At the TU, we are somewhat in the middle of a long overdue generation change, and the institute is slowly moving in a positive and more diverse direction. Fingers Crossed…
I found this question difficult. It conjures images of architects making the world a better place by designing pretty buildings or being an “amateur generalist”. I think this illusion is pretty much put to bed. I find it hard to generalise what architecture and architects have to contribute to society. We are living through a dilution and divergence of traditional job descriptions across all sectors and architecture is also part of this transformation.
Last week we had master thesis presentations. Afterwards I was talking to the mother of one of our graduates who said something like: “you need an extra description to explain what they are going to do – architect comma something”. I think that kind of sums it up, architecture is such a broad description, and I think it will only become more diverse. There is space for different approaches and specialisations, all of which will have something different to contribute to society. There is no longer a clear job description, and I think we have a responsibility to push these diverse approaches and ensure that graduates can apply situated knowledge, skills and values to different settings and problems during their careers.
We cannot underestimate the size of the challenges we face in reaching that sustainable future; the problems are complex and often involve factors outside our control. Staying determined and motivated in the face of these challenges is hugely important. This makes it all the more important to bring things into reality – it is not enough to just have good ideas; they need to be actionable.
As far as the political factors go – the Bauwende is not going to happen by itself; it is going to require legislation. On the one hand, I support many of the things being pushed by architect groups at the moment, such as the Abriss Moratorium, the Muster(UM)bauordnung and the work being done by Bauhaus Earth – on the other hand, I worry about the amount of time we loose with our internal discussions. Last week I was at the BDA Hochschultag in Berlin; the topic of discussion was how we can find space for “new themes” in university curriculums and whether there is a “sustainable aesthetic”. What could we have talked about with 150 highly influential professors if we did not waste our time discussing things that should have been clear five or even ten years ago?
I often wonder whether much of our discourse inside the architecture bubble can cut through to other spheres, such as politics. We need to concentrate on learning to communicate well with other disciplines and non-experts to think about what an expanded notion of design can mean in times of crisis and transformation – one book that inspired me on this is Ezio Manzini’s “Design When Everybody Designs” (2015 MIT Press). More than anything, we need to let go of our egos and make space for the next generation.
Keep your ego in check, listen to people carefully, get outside of your bubble, manage your work/life balance, learn from your failures, reflect on your motivation (this was a perfect opportunity to do that), produce sweet screen-printed collective clothing and lastly, stay hydrated.
Team Dis+Ko, Berlin
public works, London
morgen., Hamburg
Guerilla Architects, Berlin
Urbane Praxis, Berlin
In reality, especially with the kind of projects and collaborations we are involved with, it is more like 20% content and 80% organisation – every semester, we have a new team, new partners and new contexts – we are constantly trying to enable things, to keep things moving forwards and this requires good collective organisation and decision making. I think this mirrors a lot of what is necessary in practice – yes, good design is hugely important. We need good designers, but if you want to enjoy the trust and belief required to push through a radical environmental agenda on a serious building project, you need to be exceptionally well-organised, collaboratively minded, and an excellent communicator. This starts in the design studio. We aim always to make ourselves as teaching staff surplus to requirements and to focus on what we can learn from the people we work with, not what they can learn from us. I think it is really important to practice communicating what we do with people from different disciplines and backgrounds.
Book/Magazine: Awan, N., T. Schneider, and J. Till. Spatial Agency: Other Ways of Doing Architecture. Taylor & Francis, 2013.
Tool: Japanese Saw – also handy for bread
Studio Format: Speed Dating – great for learning to get to the point quickly
Best way to make groups: Emoji Blind Dates
Animal: Donkey – uncomplaining logistic partner with pretty eyes
Machine: MiScreen – an absolute game-changer for our screen printing side projects
Building material: Earth – a pleasure to work with and full of potential for the future
Snack: Peanuts – I don’t know what I would do without peanuts
Emoji: :whale: – Pure happiness
This is something that I am thinking about a lot in connection with my PhD. The three aspects or roles – researcher, learner, and practitioner – are intertwined. We are fortunate at the TU Berlin to have highly motivated and engaged students from all over Germany and beyond, and these are the people who will be pushing the discourse very soon. I think we all need to work on themes simultaneously from different perspectives to respond to the sheer urgency of the challenges facing us.
As teachers/learners, we have to think about what the job will be like in ten years rather than ten years ago. For instance, I wonder how many of the next generation will even have the privilege to build new buildings with new resources – so why so much focus on new construction in architecture school? Who will be able to afford to build with reinforced concrete in 10 years – so why spend so much time in Bachelor talking about concrete and gypsum drywalls? We are also practitioners, and we want to be out there with our projects on the ground with real people making a real contribution by bringing new knowledge, innovation and approaches into reality through pilot projects, prototypes and processes. Being a researcher is, for me, about reflection and looking at ways to understand, document and improve our practice.
I am interested in practice-based research approaches, which allow me to make my creative practice as a teacher a valid form of research for my thesis, that can be interrogated and challenged. I hear a lot from students who don’t think they can work “academically or scientifically”. The research landscape in our field is, like so many other things, in transformation, and the change is towards approaches that can bring practice and research much closer together. It took me a long time to find a position in a hugely complex and somewhat intimidating field, but it is a really exciting time to be a researcher.
That said, there are some serious structural and administrative problems in the German university system that make it extremely difficult to achieve any long-term job security – only the fewest people will make it to a professorship, and the majority of these people remain to come from practice, rather than an academic background. I would like to see more requirements for people with a professorship to be held to account to feedback from their colleagues and students rather than being offered a life-long position with no incentive to innovate. At the TU, we are somewhat in the middle of a long overdue generation change, and the institute is slowly moving in a positive and more diverse direction. Fingers Crossed…
I found this question difficult. It conjures images of architects making the world a better place by designing pretty buildings or being an “amateur generalist”. I think this illusion is pretty much put to bed. I find it hard to generalise what architecture and architects have to contribute to society. We are living through a dilution and divergence of traditional job descriptions across all sectors and architecture is also part of this transformation.
Last week we had master thesis presentations. Afterwards I was talking to the mother of one of our graduates who said something like: “you need an extra description to explain what they are going to do – architect comma something”. I think that kind of sums it up, architecture is such a broad description, and I think it will only become more diverse. There is space for different approaches and specialisations, all of which will have something different to contribute to society. There is no longer a clear job description, and I think we have a responsibility to push these diverse approaches and ensure that graduates can apply situated knowledge, skills and values to different settings and problems during their careers.
We cannot underestimate the size of the challenges we face in reaching that sustainable future; the problems are complex and often involve factors outside our control. Staying determined and motivated in the face of these challenges is hugely important. This makes it all the more important to bring things into reality – it is not enough to just have good ideas; they need to be actionable.
As far as the political factors go – the Bauwende is not going to happen by itself; it is going to require legislation. On the one hand, I support many of the things being pushed by architect groups at the moment, such as the Abriss Moratorium, the Muster(UM)bauordnung and the work being done by Bauhaus Earth – on the other hand, I worry about the amount of time we loose with our internal discussions. Last week I was at the BDA Hochschultag in Berlin; the topic of discussion was how we can find space for “new themes” in university curriculums and whether there is a “sustainable aesthetic”. What could we have talked about with 150 highly influential professors if we did not waste our time discussing things that should have been clear five or even ten years ago?
I often wonder whether much of our discourse inside the architecture bubble can cut through to other spheres, such as politics. We need to concentrate on learning to communicate well with other disciplines and non-experts to think about what an expanded notion of design can mean in times of crisis and transformation – one book that inspired me on this is Ezio Manzini’s “Design When Everybody Designs” (2015 MIT Press). More than anything, we need to let go of our egos and make space for the next generation.
Keep your ego in check, listen to people carefully, get outside of your bubble, manage your work/life balance, learn from your failures, reflect on your motivation (this was a perfect opportunity to do that), produce sweet screen-printed collective clothing and lastly, stay hydrated.
Team Dis+Ko, Berlin
public works, London
morgen., Hamburg
Guerilla Architects, Berlin
Urbane Praxis, Berlin
Project 1
Project 2